In this class I want to show you how meter and rhythm in music emerge from our cognitive processing of sounds. Because this holds for all humans, this explanation of meter and rhythm is as universal as you can get. It is also based on psychological experiments that have been carried out over the last decades.

Knowing the cognitive processing of sounds is of great usefulness when you are making music because it let's more consciously predict how your music will be heard by the listener, what effect it will have in the temporal realm.

In the first section, we will explore how we cognitively generate the meter step by step, by listening to an example song. We will then have a look how and why we give the time (during which the music flows past us) a structure.

In the second section, we are going to have a look at the musical elements that can produce a rhythm. In a single melody there can be several rhythms at play already. We also will explore how the rhythms are contextualised by the meter, how they get a certain meaning for the listener.

Lastly we gonna take a look at the combination of meter and rhythm, how one affects the other.